Chacham's Journal: Question: AOL keeps signing off with new router

My sister got a Dell Router (wireless), but AOL keepos signing off every five to ten minutes or so now, whether the connection is wired or wireless. The ISP is the same as it was before the router when it worked with no issues (Sprint Broadband).

Where would i even begin to look?

Traffic

[Planesdragon]

AOL, IIRC, uses a rather non-standard setup. Why not check to see what unusual ports are seeing traffic, and go from there?

Re:Traffic

[Cyberdyne]

Could be using something like UDP - where the router will create a mapping initially (allowing reply packets to get back in), but then it times out after the 10 minutes? (Or timing out an idle TCP connection, in much the same way.) I agree about looking at the traffic: you'll probably see something really obvious, like the client sending UDP traffic to someserver.aol.com and getting replies for X minutes, then the mapping times out, the traffic stops and you're logged off...

Worth a shot?

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

Try connecting the computer directly to the modem, and browse there, and then reconnect the router and wireless. It's possible you may have to tweak the MTU size to work with AOL (not sure what to set it to, but look into that). There also might be other settings to tweak. Linksys has a specific "AOL compatible" mode for their wireless APs on at least some models.

Re:Worth a shot?

[Chacham]

I did connect it directly, and it has the same problem.

thanx.